Contracts between parties who have an on-going relationship often rely on informal norms, rather than formal legal rights, to resolve disputes and reduce transaction costs. Investors financing startup firms, however, may need to look outside of their existing network to find an entrepreneur with...

In the bank-borrower setting, a firm's existing lender may exploit its positional advantage to extract rents from the firm in subsequent financings. Analogously, a startup's existing venture capital investors (VCs) may dilute the founder through a follow-on financing from these same VCs (an...

In his book, 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed - and What to Do about It,' Harvard Business School Professor, Josh Lerner, explains that governments can only play a limited role in spurring innovation and entrepreneurship....

In January 2012, amendments to California's corporate code permitted a new type of corporate form designed around for-profit entities also wishing to commit to serving a broader “social purpose” (or purposes). Although not the first state to embrace such reforms, California's experiment is...

Fueled in part by the wealth recently created from digital currencies, major art dealers such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s have embraced the sale of non-fungible tokens attached to unique digital works of art. What are non-fungible tokens, how is this related to the blockchain and what do we...

We study how venture capital firms (VCs), one major capital provider for early-stage entrepreneurial companies, respond to narcissistic entrepreneurs. VCs prefer to invest in companies with narcissistic entrepreneurs. Conditional on making an investment, VCs are more likely to impose contingent...

Studying the creation of venture boards in a hand-collected sample of 296 VC investment rounds in 132 German high-tech ventures, we find that risk exposure and investor syndication are strong predictors of whether a formal board is created or not. Our setup allows to study the creation of the...

New ventures are inherently cash-strapped. The founders who start them are typically doers — problem-identifiers and solvers who are great at finding ways to get things done within given constraints. For most entrepreneurs, the legal formalities associated with new ventures are a low priority...